Saturday, November 04, 2006

From Montana State University (website): Bozeman - A fossil-hunting trip to celebrate a son's homecoming resulted in the recent discovery of an ancient sea monster in central Montana.

Believed to be approximately 70 million years old, its skull and lower jaw represent the first complete skull of a long-necked plesiosaur found in Montana, according to MSU experts. The skull is said to be one of the best specimens of its kind in North America.

'It's a very important specimen,' MSU paleontologist Jack Horner (author of "Dinosaurs Under the Big Sky": UK | US) said at the Museum of the Rockies where the fossil rests in boxes. 'We have been looking for it for a long, long time.'

Ken Olson of Lewistown said he and his son, Garrett, found the fossils in mid-August about 75 miles northeast of Lewistown. Since Horner was in Mongolia (see "MSU, Mongolian paleontologists find 67 dinosaurs in one week"), Olson said he prepared the fossils himself and delivered them to Horner about three weeks later. Olson, a retired Lutheran pastor, has long collected fossils for the museum. Two of his best finds are the large Torosaurus skulls displayed there.

Friday, November 03, 2006

From University of Florida News: Gainesville, Florida - Genetic analysis of an obscure, worm-like creature retrieved from the depths of the North Atlantic has led to the discovery of a new phylum, a rare event in an era when most organisms have already been grouped into major evolutionary categories.

The analysis also appears to shed light on the ancestor of chordates, the backboned animals that include human beings and two small invertebrate groups closely related to one another: lancelets and tunicates.

"It's a tremendous surprise that this mysterious creature from the ocean will help us understand our distant past," said Leonid Moroz (info), a professor of neuroscience and zoology at UF's Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience near St. Augustine and one of the researchers who participated in the discovery.

Moroz and 13 other scientists report their findings today in the journal Nature.

Scientists have long been puzzled by the half-inch-long creature known by its scientific name of Xenoturbella and first retrieved from the Baltic Sea more than 50 years ago.

From Der Spiegel, Germany: Miroslaw Orzechowski, Poland's deputy education minister, has called for Polish schools to ditch Darwinism in favor of creationism. His party is also well known for gay bashing and for wanting to introduce the death penalty...

Orzechowski is intent on keeping Darwinism from falling into the wrong heads. In a recent interview, he commented that it was "sad" that the "lie" of the evolution theories of Charles Darwin were being taught in Polish schools, and called for a debate on whether Darwin's theories should be purged from the school curriculum...

Orzechowski is not the first in the LPR to come out in favor of creationism. LPR Member of the European Parliament Maciej Giertych organized a creationism conference at the European Parliament in October, where he said Darwinism should not be taught in schools. Giertych, who is a biology professor by trade, claimed that humans had had contact with dinosaurs and that Neanderthals continue to live among us...

In many countries with large Muslim populations the pendulum of power is swinging away from secular (but mostly undemocratic) government back to where it was for many centuries: to Islamist regimes, and Islamic law. What does this mean for Muslim scientists and science? For a very long time, Muslim states have scored badly on measures of science and technology. Will things be any better or worse under the new Islamist governments?

Nature 'Special' Contents:

THE ISLAMIC WORLD (Interactive World Map)NEWS FEATURES/ANALYSISTIMELINEEDITORIALCOMMENTARIESPODCASTWHAT DO YOU THINK?ARCHIVE (Not Open Access at the time of writing)EXTERNAL LINKS

Ann Arbor, Michigan: A pig-sized, tusked creature that roamed the earth some 27 million years ago represents a missing link between the oldest known relatives of elephants and the more recent group from which modern elephants descended, an international team that includes University of Michigan paleontologist William J. Sanders (homepage) has found.

The group's findings, to be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggest that mastodons and the ancestors of elephants originated in Africa, in contrast to mammals such as rhinos, giraffes and antelopes, which had their origins in Europe and Asia and migrated into Africa. The dating of the new fossil, discovered in the East African country of Eritrea, also pushes the origins of elephants and mastodons five million years farther into the past than previous records, Sanders said.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

From The Catholic Education Resource Center: Richard Dawkins appears on the The Ryan Tubridy Show of RTE radio in Dublin along with David Quinn who is one of Ireland's best known religious and social affairs commentators.

"Now, this morning, we are asking, what's wrong with religion? That's just one of the questions raised in a new book called, The God Delusion (Amazon UK | US). We're going to talk to its author - the man who's been dubbed the world's most famous, out of the closet, living atheist - Richard Dawkins."

About 350 million years ago, at the boundary of the Devonian and Carboniferous ages, the climate changed. There was no one around to record it, but there are records nonetheless in the rocks deposited by glaciers and in tissues preserved in fossils of ancient life.

"Events at the transition had terrific biological impact, marked by extinctions and the beginnings of new life forms," said Stephen Scheckler (faculty info) of Blacksburg, professor of biological sciences and geosciences at Virginia Tech. He reported on evidence of climate change that he found in the fossils of the ancestors of modern trees at the at the Geological Society of America's national meeting in Philadelphia October 22-25, 2006.

"This glaciation was not widely understood until recently," Scheckler said. "It was a worldwide event. The Europeans recognize the extinctions as the Hangenburg event, documented in a black shale deposit that contains a series of fauna changes. But the eastern United States was at a tropical latitude at that time, so the flora and fauna show less impact - but it is there. It is believed to be a time of coldness, because there was less diversity, but it is a subtle signal."

From The Scotsman: A Loch Ness Monster theory which suggests the creature is a living dinosaur has been dealt a blow by scientists.

Many believe that Nessie is a plesiosaur, a long-necked marine reptile which sought refuge in Scotland's second-largest freshwater loch when most of the species died out 160 million years ago.

But Dr Leslie Noe, a palaeontologist at Cambridge University's Sedgwick Museum, discovered that the plesiosaur would have been unable to lift its head up, swan-like, out of the water.

Most scientists believe the creatures became extinct with the other dinosaurs, but some insist it is possible that after the last Ice Age, some plesiosaurs may have been stranded in the 23-mile-long loch, which was connected to the sea.

Mothering, good or bad, sticks with an individual according to a Hot Paper by McGill University researchers Michael Meaney, Ian Weaver, and Moshe Szyf. In 2004, the authors showed that in rat pups, high levels of licking, grooming, and arched-back nursing (LG-ABN) lowered the methylation state of the NGF1-A binding site of the glucocortoid exon 17 promoter, thereby increasing activation of the glucocortoid receptor gene and triggering lasting changes in the expression of genes related to stress response.

Previously, methylation state was perceived as fixed during development, says Szyf. 'In this case,' says Duke University researcher Randy Jirtle, 'Nature is nurture.'

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

From ABC News: November 1, 2006 - London (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair (10 Downing Street website) said in an interview published on Wednesday he would be worried if creationism entered mainstream teaching in British schools.

Creationism - the view that God created the world in six days as described in the Bible - has long been at the center of controversy in the United States, where conservative Christians reject Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

Q: One subject that is of great concern to scientists is creationism. There has been a suggestion that creationism is being taught in some British schools. What are your views on this?

A: This can be hugely exaggerated. I've visited one of the schools in question and as far as I'm aware they are teaching the curriculum in a normal way. If I notice creationism becoming the mainstream of the education system in this country then that's the time to start worrying. As I've said, it's really important for science to fight the battles it needs to fight. When something like MMR arises, or stem cells, that's the time to have a real debate.

The full text of the New Scientist interview is available here or listen to it as an mp3 podcast (audio)

Why are there more species in the tropics than in the temperate regions of the globe? Many of the world's species live in the tropics (perhaps more than half), but the reason has been debated for more than 100 years.

Many researchers have hypothesized that climatic factors somehow cause species to originate more quickly in tropical regions. In a paper appearing in the November issue of The American Naturalist, John Wiens (homepage) and a group of researchers from Stony Brook University have shown that, contrary to expectations, species seem to evolve at similar rates in tropical and temperate regions. What causes the difference in species numbers between tropical and temperate regions is not something special about the tropics that leads to more rapid speciation, but rather that the temperate areas were colonized more recently, leaving less time for species to originate and accumulate in these regions.

From Norway's Aftenposten: A mysterious gelatinous ball has puzzled and fascinated researchers after undersea photographer Rudolf Svensen spotted it while diving at the mouth of the Matre fjord in Hordaland, western Norway.

On October 1 Rudolf and his brother Erling were diving when he spotted the unusual object.

"It was 50-70 centimeters (19.5-27.5 inches) in diameter and looked like a huge beach ball. It was transparent but had a kind of thick, red cord in the middle. It was a bit science-fiction," Svensen told newspaper Bergens Tidende's web site.

The Svensens contacted associate professor Torleiv Brattegard at the University of Bergen, and other experts were notified to try and solve the mystery.

Brattegard was convinced the object was organic, and possibly a species unknown to Norway.

From The Detroit News: Late-term abortion, stem cell research and gay marriage. Intelligent design, affirmative action and control of the Detroit water system.

These deep-down gut issues still hold considerable sway with Michigan voters and could tip the balance in a close race for governor between incumbent Governor Jennifer Granholm (website) and Republican challenger Dick DeVos (website).

'At the end of the day, when a voter is sitting on the fence and can't decide between two candidates, then these wedge issues come into play and will tilt the voter one way or the other,' said Detroit News pollster Ed Sarpolus.

Voters such as John Harshman, a retired auto shop owner from Detroit: 'I'm a Bible person. I'm opposed to abortion, I'm against same-sex marriage. The Bible says those things are wrong,' Harshman said. 'That's one reason why I'll vote for Mr. DeVos.' (Continued at the title link) [Richard, Creationism, Politics]-------

From NBC 17: Raleigh, North Carolina: Dinosaur discovery - Paleontologists said Nancy, a duckbilled dinosaur, lived in the grasslands and forests of what was to become Montana about 67 million years ago.

Clint Boyd and a team of paleontologists from North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences found about 80 percent of Nancy's skeleton, including a 400 pound skull.

It's one of the most complete fossils in the world.

It is so well preserved that scientists hope to recover soft tissue, including possible DNA.

"Preliminary results are positive. I only had a quick study, but it looks very promising. We'll be able to recover soft tissues from this dinosaur as well," said Dr. Mary Schweitzer (homepage - also see "Dinosaur Shocker" from the Smithsonian) of N.C. State.

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

From CBC News, Canada: There may be a little Neanderthal in all of us.

That's the conclusion of anthropologists who have re-examined 30,000-year-old fossilized bones from a Romanian cave - bones that languished in a drawer since the 1950s*.

According to the researchers, these early Homo sapien bones show anatomical features that could only have arisen if the adult female in question had Neanderthal ancestors as part of her lineage.

The findings may answer nagging questions: Did modern humans and Neanderthals interbreed on a significant scale? And were the Neanderthals exterminated about 28,000 years ago - as some anthropologists contend - or did they gradually assimilate into the gene pool of people living today?

"From my perspective, the replacement vs. continuity debate that raged through the 1990s is now dead," said the study's American co-author, Erik Trinkaus (homepage), a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.

* The human bones were first identified at the Pestera Muierii (Cave of the Old Woman) cave in 1952. [Neandertal, Neandertals, Fossil, Fossils, Sapiens]

From The Australian: Surely a chair in science and religion is a contradiction in terms?

Peter Harrison (homepage) - about to take up precisely that chair at Oxford University after many years at Bond University (Queensland, Australia) - laughs good-naturedly at the devil's advocate question. Where some see only conflict between reason and revelation, he sees also a history of co-operation embodied by pious thinkers such as Isaac Newton.

'It's important to understand that (science and religion) are separate operations but I don't think this means that they are, as (evolutionary biologist) Stephen Jay Gould would have it, quite discrete universes or 'non-overlapping magisteria',' Harrison says.

'If you say God created the world, for example, it does seem to me that that's a factual statement of some kind that may have scientific implications, and if it doesn't, you have to wonder what kind of claim it is.'

From the Washington Post: Washington, D.C. - If you're Happy and you know it, pat your head. That, in a peanut shell, is how a 34-year-old female Asian elephant in the Bronx Zoo showed researchers that pachyderms can recognize themselves in a mirror - complex behavior observed in only a few other species.

The test results suggest elephants - or at least the one called 'Happy' - are self-aware. The ability to distinguish oneself from others had been shown only in humans, chimpanzees and, to a limited extent, dolphins.

...In a 2005 experiment, Happy faced her reflection in an 8-by-8-foot mirror and repeatedly used her trunk to touch an "X" painted above her eye. The elephant could not have seen the mark except in her reflection.

It was a discovery that excited scientists and JRR Tolkien fans alike. When the skull of a tiny human-like creature was unearthed in Flores, Indonesia, in 2003, it was seen by many as evidence that an unknown humanoid species had once lived in the rainforests.

But now scientists from Roehampton University have debunked the myth of the living hobbit, claiming he was merely a human with a small head.

Dr Robert Martin and Dr Ann M. Maclarnon of the School of Human and Life Sciences at Roehampton (UK) led the team of scientists, which concluded the 18,000-year-old remains display the symptoms of microcephaly - a condition which leaves its human sufferers with an undersize skull.

Their findings will be published in scientists' forum the Anatomical Record in November. [Continued at title link] [Hobbits]

The proposed new hominid Homo floresiensis is based on specimens from cave deposits on the Indonesian island Flores. The primary evidence, dated at 18,000 y, is a skull and partial skeleton of a very small but dentally adult individual (LB1). Incomplete specimens are attributed to eight additional individuals. Stone tools at the site are also attributed to H. floresiensis. The discoverers interpreted H. floresiensis as an insular dwarf derived from Homo erectus, but others see LB1 as a small-bodied microcephalic Homo sapiens. Study of virtual endocasts, including LB1 and a European microcephalic, purportedly excluded microcephaly, but reconsideration reveals several problems. The cranial capacity of LB1 ( 400 cc) is smaller than in any other known hominid less than 3.5 Ma and is far too small to derive from Homo erectus by normal dwarfing. By contrast, some associated tools were generated with a prepared-core technique previously unknown for H. erectus, including bladelets otherwise associated exclusively with H. sapiens. The single European microcephalic skull used in comparing virtual endocasts was particularly unsuitable. The specimen was a cast, not the original skull (traced to Stuttgart), from a 10-year-old child with massive pathology. Moreover, the calotte does not fit well with the rest of the cast, probably being a later addition of unknown history. Consideration of various forms of human microcephaly and of two adult specimens indicates that LB1 could well be a microcephalic Homo sapiens. This is the most likely explanation for the incongruous association of a small-brained recent hominid with advanced stone tools. Anat Rec Part A, 288A:1123-1145, 2006.